| > I've seen more than once recently an engineer saying that software solutions outside of the Serverless ecosystem (FaaS, DB, etc) is "the new legacy". There's, as I see it, three different kinds of legacy: (1) code that has an inordinately costs to maintain and especially update to changing requirements because it lacks tests, documentation of existing business intent and/or design, or otherwise has lost institutional knowledge needed for nontrivial work, relying on the foggy memories of a high priesthood increasingly, over time, working through ritual without understanding, (2) software with deep and fundamental dependencies on platforms or external components that are no longer supported or no longer available, and (3) software which doesn't meet the current arbitrary tech platform decisions of the organization using it, but which has no fundamental problem preventing maintenance or use. In lots of places, software that isn't adapted to a particular serverless architecture that the org has adopted is now the third type of legacy. > And that cloud providers have solved all the pains that Erlang was supposed to address. They haven't, though for some use cases, the parts of the stack Erlang would be most useful for implementing are the parts you are likely to just get from a cloud vendor (that's not true of all use cases, though.) > Elixir sounds very compelling to me, but I worry that I might be going in a direction that's not where the industry is going. Elixir is probably not the best bet if your concern is to direct the most focussed possible effort learning the things that are most likely to dominate the largest share ofnthr general software dev marketplace in the near future. |
[0]: https://fly.io/phoenix-files